Sudden Death.

I needed to finish up a bunch of stuff over the weekend - most notably, the second chapter of Ivy. Tuesday (today) would be the night I was to speak at the Multnomah County Library, and I needed the chapters finished up and with cover images to print into minicomics. So of course, what happens? Friday morning I wake up and turn on the ol' EMachine. Nothing.

Dead.

Three and a half years of working perfectly - no crashes, no memory loss. And now when I need her the most she lets me down.

I was without a machine all weekend; fortunately Petr came to my rescue and fixed me up with a new Gateway (which has crashed twice in the two days I've had it), and he rescued my hard drive and transferred my files to the new machine. I have none of my old programs except the 15- 0r 30-day trial versions of Photoshop and Nero. I had to run out and buy a new scanner and wireless card because my old ones aren't compatible with Windows Vista (thumbs down on Vista, btw). I lost such seemingly trivial things as my downloaded (and paid for) games, Firefox bookmarks and auto-fill passwords. But somehow in the middle of all this I managed to bust out the last six pages of Ivy Chapter Two, both covers for the minis, and an illustration for the Willamette Week. How did I do it, you might ask? Well, I got this secret weapon now.

It's called a work schedule.

I have been living with some very bad habits these days, the greatest of which was the way I spent my time. I wasted huge chunks of daylight hours screwing around. But no longer! My schedule now takes me through a decent 6 hours of working time between 9 and 5, and I see now that when I stick to it, things get done. Amazing. My hope for finishing this monster is renewed. An added benefit is that I've been coming up with new ideas for side projects as well. I'm already mulling over a series of short stories about a retirement community who experiences an outbreak of gonorrhea. It's called Swinghaven and takes place in one of those guarded, gated buildings with a pool and a bingo room. The cast of characters is already forming in my mind. Keep posted!